Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living

politifact.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 130 posts

Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living

#51

Post by xapata »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #10
patio11 wrote: post #4

A challenge with poverty rates in the US is that they often essentially proxy for "what proportion of the population recently immigrated from low-wage countries"; immigration from e.g. Mexico to the US often causes the poverty rate in both countries to rise and every actual human to be better off. California has ~10 million immigrants; many of them arrived rather recently. (I think this is a variation on Simpson's pa…

Is this really true for Mexican immigration? The stereotype is that the US gets Mexican peasants and Indian doctors, at least. Everything you say is true for the Indian doctor or Chinese software engineer. Thus their departure would raise incomes in Mexico while lowering it in the US. So your point is mostly right, at least as it relates to this story.

At least partly true, in that immigration is a net benefit to nearly everyone.

Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living

#52

Post by yummyfajitas »

xapata wrote: post #51
yummyfajitas wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this really true for Mexican immigration? The stereotype is that the US gets Mexican peasants and Indian doctors, at least. Everything you say is true for the Indian doctor or Chinese software engineer. Thus their departure would raise incomes in Mexico while lowering it in the US. So your point is mostly right, at least as it relates to this story.

At least partly true, in that immigration is a net benefit to nearly everyone.

I agree with this and support more or less open borders due to comparative advantage (even below average people can provide benefits due to trade). I was simply questioning whether Mexico is really sending us people above their mean/median.

Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living

#53

Post by dmode »

This headline gets repeated a lot, but it is extremely misleading. Due to it's huge size, California has communities and cost of living that are vastly different. I don't understand how you can assign a single cost of living measure to the entire state. A cost of living adjustment that is true for coastal California will be wildly off base for people living on Mojave desert. A better study will reflect supplemental poverty rate broken down by their cohort regions.

Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living

#54

Post by xapata »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #52
xapata wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least partly true, in that immigration is a net benefit to nearly everyone.

I agree with this and support more or less open borders due to comparative advantage (even below average people can provide benefits due to trade). I was simply questioning whether Mexico is really sending us people above their mean/median.

Very tough to measure, as the most poor would be the most averse to tracking.

Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living

#55

Post by j4kp07 »

laurencerowe wrote: post #42
xienze wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we talking about immigrants or "immigrants"? I seriously doubt the immigrants of the illegal -- excuse me, "undocumented" -- variety are anything but poor. That's the reason the Mexican government is so eager to keep the whole thing going -- they get to simultaneously foist their poor upon the US while said poor send back billions in remittances. It's a major industry for Mexico, believe it or not.

Net illegal immigration from Mexico has been negative since 2009. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/02/what-we-know...

That's because one person can be deported multiple times and the definition of "Deportation" has changed to include those apprehended at the border.

Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living

#56

Post by Throwaway23412 »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #52
xapata wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least partly true, in that immigration is a net benefit to nearly everyone.

I agree with this and support more or less open borders due to comparative advantage (even below average people can provide benefits due to trade). I was simply questioning whether Mexico is really sending us people above their mean/median.

Would they have to? The USA has a GDP (PPP) per capita around 3x that of Mexico. The sheer magnitude of the difference in purchasing power would make patio11's claim true, even if they were hypothetically, in our president's words, sending us drug dealers, criminals, and rapists.

Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living

#57

Post by yellowapple »

dmode wrote: post #53

This headline gets repeated a lot, but it is extremely misleading. Due to it's huge size, California has communities and cost of living that are vastly different. I don't understand how you can assign a single cost of living measure to the entire state. A cost of living adjustment that is true for coastal California will be wildly off base for people living on Mojave desert. A better study will reflect supplemental p…

Even a per-county breakdown would be accurate enough to be useful on at least a basic level.

Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living

#58

Post by orasis »

j4kp07 wrote: post #55
laurencerowe wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Net illegal immigration from Mexico has been negative since 2009. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/02/what-we-know...

That's because one person can be deported multiple times and the definition of "Deportation" has changed to include those apprehended at the border.

Can you provide more credible data on this?

Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living

#59

Post by adventured »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #40
hkmurakami wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possibly the middle class Mexican citizens who have the resources to make the journey across the border in the first place.

Middle class Mexican citizens can live good lives in Mexico, so they don't need to risk dangerous border crossing to end up a poor illegal immigrant in the US.

That's incorrect. As domestic wages rise in a poor nation, emigration rises because the burgeoning middle class is better able to leave. That's why the US saw such a dramatic increase in immigration from Latin America since 1980, as wages have soared (relatively) there. The US now sees more immigration from Latin America every ten years, than it did in a century from 1880-1980. The desperately poor aren't the primary source of emigration around the world, they're mostly unable to move from their location. It's overwhelmingly not the Chinese or Indian poor (a billion people earning sub $5 per day) that are emigrating to the US, it's their middle class and higher - the truly poor can't move from their spot.

One of the most obvious examples of this - for generations, health care professionals in low-development nations have been emigrating, seeking higher incomes in the developed world. That's despite the fact that they're almost always middle class or higher in their own country. You could see this in action over the last 50 years across poor nations in Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. Currently the middle class is flooding out of various poor Eastern European nations, seeking a better life in eg Britain.

There were about a dozen articles posted on HN about this concept when the Syrian refugee crisis was peaking.

Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living

#60

Post by vacri »

rpmcmurphy wrote: post #28

The problem with the way poverty is measured in the US is it measures relative income. Being poor relative to other people sucks, but consider the following. You can be poor in the US, and have: - Clean running water - Electricity - Heat - Phone, now plus internet access - Paved roads - Access to basic health care (for now, thanks Obama!) Disclosure: I went through bankruptcy and foreclosure, so I know exactly how mu…

> but that would be true anywhere outside of northern Europe or Canada as well

Don't forget the Antipodes.

Post reply on HN